The Orocos development team is proud to announce the fifth major release of the Orocos Toolchain. It's a fat month late, partly due to your maintainer being loaded, partly due to the had-to-fix-show-stoppers that popped up the last month. The end result is shining though.

The Robotics Demonstration and Test team, in the NASA Goddard Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office, used the Orocos ecosystem to control a Motoman SIA10D industrial robot to demonstrate autonomous visual tracking of both cooperative, and uncooperative, targets in microgravity. NASA robot visually tracking a free-floating, non-cooperative target

Based on the Orocos Toolchain v2.4.0, this release fixes the 'type mismatch' issue for Ubuntu Lucid users. Also other small fixes for the Orocos-ROS integration have been applied, such as a cmake problem when generating typekits and generating a correct header file name in the typekit/ subdirectory. This project is available on http://www.ros.org/wiki/orocos_toolchain_ros

A new major release of the Orocos Toolchain is available, the 4th since our 2.0 cycle started. This release confirms the trend of the previous releases: getting bugs out of the core libraries and extending/improving the tooling.

Notable improvements can be found in the rtt-lua scripting bindings, which is nearing its 1.0 release and widely used by now; a new appender for logging to Apache ChainSaw has been added to OCL's logging service; orogen/typegen has evolved further, including a generic POSIX mqueue transport and the RTT data flow implementation has been optimized to only have minimal copies of data. Various anoying bugs were fixed in RTT XML serialization, Taskbrowser and scripting.

The euRobotics Forum workshop on Orocos has been a great success. About 30
people attended and participated in the hands-on workshop. The Real-Time &
Open Source in Robotics track drew more than 60 people. Both tracks were
overbooked.

We would like to thank all participants for attending our workshop and the
enthousiasm with which they have completed it. We also appreciated the
feedback and we will certainly do something with that.
We have put all presentation material on-line on the workshop wiki pages,
see here for a direct link:http://www.orocos.org/wiki/orocos/eurobotics2011/eurobotics-workshop-mat...

Intermodalics, Locomotec and KU Leuven organize an Orocos hands-on workshop on April 7 at the euRobotics Forum 2011, held in Västerås, Sweden on April 6-8. This is the major annual networking event for academic and industrial robotics researchers and product developers. Attending this event is only 94€ which includes all meals served at the European Robotics Forum on April 6-8, including dinner and evening activities. The participants also get free access to the exhibition and three full days of interesting seminars and sessions.

During the workshop, the participants will use their own laptop to control a real and a simulated KUKA YouBot, for which Locomotec is doing the distribution.

We are setting up a workshop webpage where participants can find the instructions on how to prepare for this workshop. Registration for the workshop is required, registered users will also receive updates by email as the instruction are updated.

All the buzz was right, a new release was anxiously waiting to become official, only being released when all tests pass on all platforms. We got it rock-solid on various Linux flavors, Windows (Visual Studio) and Mac OS-X. Focusing on usability instead of features, it accumulates tons of suggestions and improvements offered by the community, translated in 262 patches alone for RTT between 2.2.0 and 2.3.0.

The v2.2.1 bugfix release of the Orocos toolchain is out. As usual, this release fixes issues discovered in the 2.2.0 release. Most notable improvements are:

Bootstrapping (bootstrap.sh script) works in ROS environments. It will detect if you're in a ROS_ROOT environment and check your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. OCL and RTT will install according to ROS 'standards'. Click below to read the rest of this post.